Originally posted on T-Nation:
My name's Meat. It used to be Edward Worthington the 3rd, but I changed it to Meat — you know, one of those cool one-word names like my idol, Flex.
You might not know it to look at me, but years ago, I was a loser. I had a wife who worked part-time as a lingerie model, a kid, a big 7-bedroom house in the suburbs, a Jaguar XKE, and a "fulfilling" job organizing relief funds for starving children. Sure, I lifted weights, but I barely got in an hour a day. My body fat was a disgusting 9% and I could barely bench 300 pounds. Go ahead, say it. Loser.
Then one day, while reading Flex magazine and looking over a 15-page tribute to bodybuilder Tommi Thorvildsen's ass, I realized what a waste my life was and that maybe, just maybe, it wasn't too late to turn things around.
So I quit my job and devoted my life to the lofty and worthwhile goal of being a stone cold stud with buns, abs, pecs, etc., of steel. I sold my house and got rid of most of my possessions. I even traded in my car for a '72 Oldsmobile and moved into its trunk to save money. It's not too bad except for when I throw a big dinner party or something and the guests have to sit on the wheel housings.
Anyhow, I started training twice a day for 4 to 6 hours at a time.
Don't get me wrong, it's not like I turned into some sort of leech on society or earned money by jumping out of cakes at gay birthday parties or anything. Hell, I've got my pride. After I quit my loser job, I was lucky enough to get a managerial position with a local restaurateur. Yep, I was in charge of security at the Denny's on Main Street. You may not think that a place like that needs a bouncer, but let me tell you, when some a-hole starts complaining about how the eggs in their Grand Slam breakfast are a little runny, you want that bastard ushered out the door, and I mean fast before the big trouble starts.
Anyhow, the hours don't interfere with my lifting, it's not too stressful, and besides, I think it does our sport good when the public can see us working in positions of responsibility.
Sure, my wife freaked out after all this, left me, and got custody of the kid, but hey, who needs the aggravation? Shit, they were really selfish, anyhow. Take for instance the time I was doing some one-legged calf raises by our old pool. I was really grindin' 'em out, feelin' the burn, when my wife comes out to show me some of the new lingerie she was going to be modeling. If that wasn't potentially distracting enough, one of her damn 5-inch heels breaks off and she does a header into the pool.
So she starts with the, "Help me, help me, I'm drowning!" crap. I got really pissed.
"Help me, I'm drownnning," I mimed. "What about me? What about my needs? Do you really think I'm going to build awesome calves if I have to come running every time you have a problem?"
I threw a lawn chair into the pool, figuring she could balance on it with one foot and keep her head above water until I was done. A couple of sets, later, I dragged her out of the pool but after she regained consciousness she got all attitudinal on me. Bitch.
And then there was that Friday night when my 7-year-old daughter calls me on the phone. The name on her birth certificate is Heather, but fuck that, I call her Nicole in honor of Nicole Bass, the most awesome female bodybuilder who ever lived.
I say, "Nicole, honey, what is it?"
She starts pouting something about her real name being Heather, but I ignore the brat. Then she throws out some crap about me maybe taking her out to the park the next day to kick a soccer ball around. Now Saturday's normally the day I work on my serratus, so I lose it.
"Listen, whore spawn, while you may think that kicking a goddam soccer ball around the park is some big deal, I've got more important things to do! I'm not like some other 'daddy' that's got such shitty serratus that her daughter has to cry herself to sleep at night out of shame!"
That's when the waterworks start. A couple of seconds later her mother gets on the phone and starts screaming something about being insensitive, self-absorbed, yada yada. I don't need all that catabolic aggravation, so I hang up on them, whip up a liver and whey shake, open up the trunk a bit so the light comes on and chill out by studying "The Education of a Bodybuilder," the life story of the Oak.
The whole book's inspiring as hell, but I especially remember the part where Arnold's dad died. The Oak was training for the Olympia, so he just couldn't be bothered with attending the funeral. So when my brother called the other day to say that our grandmother was dying and that I should come say good-bye, I instead went to the gym to train my left soleus muscle, which had been lagging a bit.
Besides, I couldn't help remembering all the times the old hag had tried to undermine my bodybuilding efforts by serving me Sunday meals that were all fucked up glycemically. I mean, c'mon, sweet potatoes? Home made
ice cream? Fuckin' Jell-O with marshmallows floatin' around in it? Burn in hell, Nana!
Screw 'em all. To be a champion, you gotta' dump all the superfluous stuff like family, girlfriends, friends, pets, jobs, sports, television, sunsets, vacations, hobbies, masturbation, dialysis, etc.
Sure, there have been drawbacks along the way. I kind of miss having dates where the girl and I didn't take turns shaving each other's backs, and I'll admit that I probably overdid it a bit with the steroids. I only say that because my penis fell off during a set of rock-bottom squats and I now wear a wine bottle cork where my dick used to be. Pulling it out and hearing the pee slosh out just isn't the same, but all I gotta' do to make me forget all that is look in the mirror and check out the crisp separation between my upper pecs and the anterior delts.
Then there was the time I nabbed a crate of orals from Thailand. I filled up a bunch of Pez dispensers with them, and I was probably popping 200 of them a day. I started feeling a little punky, along with my skin turning the exact shade of yellow as Sesame Street's Big Bird, so I flew out to see a specialist in Zurich, Switzerland.
He didn't think there was anything he could do, short of
"Removing my liver and burying it underneath Yucca Mountain in Nevada for 10,000 years or so until it cooled off," so I took some milk thistle and decided to mask the color by going to one of those new style tanning places where you stand on an electrically charged plate and they spray you with tanning solution. I was a little wigged out from just having mainlined 2 grams of D-bol, so I mistakenly walked into an Earl Scheib where they bondo'd the crack in my ass and spray painted me metallic green.
I've had troubles with my diet, too, like the time I got really serious about my protein intake. I'd been taking in roughly 20,000 grams a day. That's one gram of protein per ounce of body weight — fuck that one-gram per pound stuff. Then I'd collect my morning feces in a couple of Hefty bags and take them to the post office to be weighed. Hey, if you're serious about bodybuilding, you want to make sure that your body is assimilating as much protein as it should. Like if my turds weighed more than, say, a Yugo, I'd know that I needed to take some extra digestive enzymes.
Problem was, after weighing it, the clerk mistakenly slapped some postage on it and over-nighted it to Iraq. I heard later that the Iraqi mistook it for some contraband fissionable material and tried to use it to further their nuclear weapons program, but it obviously failed. So, in a way, I sorta' did my part for world peace, which I'm kinda' proud of.
And even though I sometimes get a little lonely and cry so much that I wake up with the car mat all soggy, I wouldn't trade any of it away. I mean, just look at what I've accomplished! Just last month I took third place in the Almost Light Heavyweight division (188 to 188 3/4 pounds) of the Mr. Animal Magnetism Championships held in the lunchroom of the Samuel Gompers Elementary School on the West Side of Akron, Ohio. And next month, next month, they'll be running my picture in the "Up and Coming" section of the Portuguese edition of Flex.
Yep, I've got it all. I've got a trophy, got my picture published in a magazine, and I even correspond regularly with famous bodybuilders. For example, I got a letter recently from none other than Ox Ferguson, winner of the NPC States That Resemble Penises Championships. Ox offered me, his "special friend," a "special one-time offer" of a one-on-one phone consultation for the "special unheard of price of 49 dollars." And you know he doesn't just do that for anybody. Fuck no.
Reach for your dreams. Don't let rational thought stand in your way. Ignore the plaintive wailings of friends, family, and psychiatrists. You too can have it all.
— Meat
July, 2002
